Don Schatz -- Eunice’s Reflections

I first met Don in a darkened room at the University of Chicago where a psychology professor was studying the relationship between Interest and Pupil Dilation.  Don was standing a few feet away with a camera focused on my eyes, but my interest was more in him.  Don and I had had several chance encounters over the preceding weeks where he seemed to want to pursue the relationship.  We discovered that both of us were reading the same book, The Chosen by Chaim Potok!  Then one day I was frantically running out the front door of our workplace, knowing that I was in a predicament of my own making where I needed protection.  I ran straight into Don, who looked at my worried face and said, “You look upset.”  I confessed my need for protection.  His reply resonates today: “I’ll take care of you.” 

He drove me to his favorite delicatessen and we sat there as the late autumn sun filtered through the window and the two of us began saying strange things to each other.  Don said, “I think there’s something here for us.”  “I am glad we are here now.”

When we drove back to the University, before I got out of the car, Don touched my shoulder with one finger to bid me goodbye.  That touch felt like an embrace.  Over the next weeks, Don and I spent evenings together, soon saying in Don’s enigmatic language what I also knew, that we were meant to be together.  I said, “God is between us forever.” 

After our wedding in April 1969, I began introducing Don to my friends.  A group of us found that we had common interests in addressing racial tensions in Chicago, which were high following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  Together we formed the Urban Life Center, designed for college students in the rural Midwest who shared these concerns but needed direct exposure to the urban environment.  Self-directed learning was our educational model.  Today the Center continues to exist as the Chicago Center for Urban Life and Culture. 

At the Center, Don excelled in working with students in the arts, music and theater, all of which were alive in South Side Chicago.  His own early experience had traversed the three creative areas: music (especially jazz), painting and poetry.  His exposure to jazz was shared by a good friend, Stu Katz, with whom he spent a lot of time.  Stu fell in love with Don’s sister, Penny, and married her, creating a bond between the four of us that continues to this day.  They became my family, too.

All of Don’s interest in the arts were related to his attempts to deal with the tragedy of the Holocaust, which had affected some of his mother’s family in Vilna.  He had gone to Europe to see art and later exhibited his own somber work at Hyde Park Art Gallery in Chicago.  He then turned to writing poetry.  Along the way, Don visited a Trappist abbey in Gethsemani, where he met and engaged in conversation with Thomas Merton. . .a figure who was important to both of us. 

After ten years at the Urban Life Center, Don wanted to establish a more independent identity and move away from the familiar way he was known in Chicago, so we moved to Boston.  I was 50, the time when we now know people begin to change the way they look at the meaning of their lives, looking at the interior more than the exterior.  I knew I wanted to help other people find their vocation and the meaning of their life as I settled in Boston. 

Don is the one who unearthed an opportunity for this work.  He made contact with a downtown ministry headed by Episcopal priest, Richard Faxon.  Don saw that my input could help achieve goals we shared in common and so introduced me.  The result was the formation of Life Work Direction with the three of us.  People came to our simple Dorchester storefront starting in 1981, a time of high unemployment in New England. 

Scott Walker was one of the first to come by and began stopping in often.  When Scott married Louise and they started their family, in 1990 they bought a house in Jamaica Plain.  Knowing our need for better space, they offered their first-floor unit to Life Work Direction and Don and me.  Then in 2005, Scott and Louise joined us in the work of LWD, adding their own innovative program for younger people, Threshold, to our mix.  Their influence also deepened our ministry of Spiritual Companionship to individuals and to couples, who increasingly saw the deeper current underlying their questions about the direction of their life and their work. This more powerfully fulfilled the basic purpose as explicitly stated in Life Work Direction’s original charter.

By 2010, Don longed to spend more of his time writing poetry.  But this did not remove him from contact with clients, who now recall how he always met them at the door with a smile and characteristic comments.  He always related to people as they were and as he was. 

Actually, our work always came from the two of us — as one.  I might have mapped the curriculum, but Don’s input was strategic — pointed questions that often surprised.  I am now receiving ample assurance that his part of the work was unforgettable and life changing.  Don is a force. . .

Nine years later in 2019, both of us moved into a kind of retirement at Goddard House in Brookline, where Don was instantly recognized for his characteristically engaging ways of making contact, including wearing one of his many interesting hats. 

Now Don is dearly beloved by people from so many chapters of his life, including the final days before God welcomed him home.   I am so privileged to have had 52 years with this person whom God gave to me and to all of you. 

Eunice

To learn more about Don's remarkable life and work with Eunice, and to read his poetry, visit his website: http://www.donschatz.com/bio.html